The son of a fur buyer, Dr. Solow was a Brooklyn-born Harvard graduate with a quicksilver wit and liberal political leanings. His research made him a respected voice on public policy, particularly on matters of employment.
Dr. Solow, who spent most of his career teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served on government panels and was a senior staff economist on President John F. Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers in the early 1960s. He was a believer in the Keynesian theory of government intervention in the economy, which put him at odds with conservative economists such as Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate who espoused free markets.
“Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply,” Dr. Solow quipped while on a panel with Friedman. “Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.”
In a special 2007 issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy devoted to the impact of Dr. Solow’s work, the editors wrote that his seminal 1956 paper, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” and a follow-up paper in 1957, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” were “among the most influential and revered articles in economic theory.”
Those papers, the editors wrote, had “transformed growth theory from arguably obscure debates about stability and gloomy knife-edge properties into a fully fledged, flexible framework for analyzing key growth questions [such as] the impact of changes in savings, population, depreciation, and technical progress on the level and growth of output.”
Dr. Solow was essentially a theorist who devised statistical or mathematical models to describe the interplay of economic forces and was a pioneer in what came to be known as “total factor productivity,” the respective contributions of labor, natural resources and capital goods to increases in national income.
He was in his 30s when he laid the groundwork for his Nobel-winning theories, devising mathematical analyses that showed how technological progress accounted for much of U.S. economic growth in the first half of the 20th century. Previously, increases in capital and labor alone were widely believed to have played dominant roles in the growth rate.
“Solow’s theoretical model had an enormous impact on economic analysis,” the citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences read. “… Above all, Solow’s growth model constitutes a framework within which modern macroeconomic theory can be structured.”
The strong role of technological progress identified by Dr. Solow contributed to a greater emphasis by governments on higher education and technological research.
His liberal politics found expression in a collection of papers appraising the Kennedy-Johnson years that he and economist Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University compiled and edited. It was published in 1974 as “The Great Society: Lessons for the Future.”
In a final chapter, Dr. Solow and Ginzberg wrote that “there is nothing in the history of the 1960s to suggest that it is a law of nature that social legislation cannot deal effectively with social problems, or that state and local governments or private enterprise will always do better than the ‘Feds.’”
It was as if they were disputing the conservative doctrine of the Reagan administration, to come less than a decade later.
Implying support for a government safety net to help those with the lowest incomes, the editors also said: “The prolonged economic prosperity of the 1960s helped to lift many families out of poverty but this longest boom in the nation’s history also proved that economic growth is not the answer for all who lack an adequate income.”
The oldest of three children, Robert Merton Solow was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 23, 1924.
“I was good at school from the very beginning, but not very intellectual until my last year in high school,” he wrote in a Nobel biographical statement. “Then one of those teachers who make a difference taught me to read the great 19th century French and Russian novelists, and to take ideas seriously.”
He graduated from high school two months before he turned 16. He initially planned to enter Brooklyn College, whose tuition was free to New York City residents, but enrolled at Harvard University in 1940 on a full scholarship after an English teacher convinced him he probably could get into the elite college.
Months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Harvard sophomore enlisted in the Army because “it seemed that there were more urgent and exciting matters than what I was doing,” he wrote in his Nobel statement.
He spoke German and knew Morse code, and so the Army assigned him to a signals intelligence unit that fought its way up the Italian peninsula in 1943-1945. The unit’s mission was to intercept, decode and translate communications between German tactical units.
For his leadership of that unit, then-Tech Sgt. Solow was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, but he turned down a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. He explained in a 2014 interview for this obituary that taking the commission would have altered his relationship with the other enlisted men in his unit or would have led to his transfer to another unit.
In August 1945, he was on home leave pending possible reassignment to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan when word came of the Japanese surrender after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Looking back, he recalled in the MIT interview, “I have never held it against Harry Truman that he dropped that bomb.”
That same year, he married Barbara Lewis, a Radcliffe student who became an economic historian. She died in 2014. Survivors include sons John Solow and Andrew Solow; a daughter, Katherine Solow; eight grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
After his military discharge, Robert Solow completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1947. He also became research assistant to future Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, a pioneer of the economic input-output analysis. Leontief “taught me economic theory and use of mathematics in economics,” he said.
He joined the MIT faculty in 1949, while still working on his doctoral dissertation for Harvard (a degree he received in 1951). In 1961, he won the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association to an American economist under age 40 who has made the most significant contributions to the field. In 1979, he served as the association’s president.
At MIT, Dr. Solow formed a close relationship with the economic theorist and textbook author Paul A. Samuelson, whose office was next door. Samuelson, who died in 2009, was the first American economist to win a Nobel. Their proximity at MIT, Dr. Solow later wrote in his Nobel biography, “began what is now almost 40 years of almost daily conversations about economics, politics, our children, cabbages and kings.”
Dr. Solow also became known for his mentorship of future Nobel laureates such as George A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz (who shared the prize in 2001) and Peter A. Diamond (2010). They were among many high-powered graduate students who enrolled at MIT as Dr. Solow and others emphasized that the department put the education of students ahead of faculty research.
After retiring from teaching in 1995, Dr. Solow pursued several intellectual interests. He and Alan Krueger, a Princeton-based scholar and future chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, compiled and edited essays about the U.S. economic boom of 1995-2000 in their book “The Roaring Nineties: Can Full Employment be Sustained?” (2001).
Dr. Solow also devoted himself to examining, with others, the nature and institutional background of low-wage work in the United States and a few European countries.
Dr. Solow was not hostile to technology (it was central to his theory of economic growth), but he disliked and rarely used email. He offered this “economist’s explanation” of his distaste for electronic correspondence in the 2014 interview for this obituary: “If you make communications costless, you will get messages of zero value.”
